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the apartment, he had discovered it on his secret scouting trips through the embassy compound. “You’ve got a big garden.”
    “In Delhi we had an even bigger garden,” she said. “Not as well kept as this one, but there were monkeys, just imagine that! One of them came in through my window once and stole a schoolbook.”
    “Monkeys?” Hiroshi was amazed. He didn’t actually know where Delhi was—in India, maybe?—but this girl had obviously traveled the world. He was almost envious. “That won’t happen to you here.”
    “Oh, it was funny actually. Besides, it was my math book, so it didn’t matter.” She chuckled. He liked it when she laughed.
    “Where do you go to school?” he asked. If she couldn’t read Japanese, then she could hardly go to a normal school.
    She stopped laughing abruptly and sighed. “I don’t. I have a tutor from Paris who teaches me. My mother says that’s so I’ll learn the same things as I would at home. But I’d rather have classmates.”
    Hiroshi knew that she came from a country called France, in Europe. He had looked it up in an atlas, but he found it hard to imagine what it looked like and what it would be like to live there. He thought of the other children in his class and how they liked to tease him for being the smallest. “Classmates aren’t always so great,” he said.
    “I went to an international school in Delhi,” Charlotte declared. “I had a best friend there, Brenda.” She paused. Hiroshi realized she found it painful to think about it. “We said we would write to each other, but she’s never replied to my letters.”
    “That’s too bad,” he said.
    She nodded. “Yes. It’s because my father’s an ambassador. So he has to go to a new country every few years, and of course we have to go with him. I’ve already been to India, and before that it was Congo, and when I was very little we lived in San Francisco.” Charlotte looked him up and down. “What does your father do?”
    Hiroshi shrugged. “No idea. I don’t know him. All I know is that he’s American.”
    “You’ve never seen him?”
    “No.”
    “Do you have a photo of him at least?”
    Hiroshi nodded. “At home.”
    “You must show me one day.” She took a framed picture of herself with her family from her desk. Her father had light brown, slightly wavy hair and a rather sardonic smile. “This is in front of the house where we lived in Delhi.” She pointed at the background, which consisted of a few palm trees and some gray trees with curiously intertwined branches. “That was the garden. You can’t see any monkeys in the picture, though.”
    “It sounds as though you liked it better in Delhi than here,” Hiroshi suggested.
    “I just don’t like being alone all the time, that’s all.” She scooted over to her shelf with all the dolls and took down the one Hiroshi had repaired. “How ever did you do it? It was completely busted.”
    Hiroshi shrugged. “I have a lot of tools. I just tried things out.”
    “Real tools?”
    “Yes. I always ask for tools for my birthday. Christmas, too. I prefer building things to buying things.” For some reason, he didn’t want to admit that most of the time he never even had money to buy things.
    Charlotte looked thoughtfully at the doll. “Funny. I never really liked this doll before, but she’s something special now. I think from now on I’ll call her Valérie.” She repeated the name as though letting a drop of some delicate flavor melt onto her tongue. “Valérie. Yes, that’s her name.” She went back to the shelf and carefully put the doll back where it had been sitting. “I’m afraid we can’t really play today, because my parents are giving a reception this evening,” she said. “I always have to be there as well. I still have to shower and let them do my hair and get me ready. It always takes much too long.”
    “Ah,” said Hiroshi. He didn’t quite know what a reception was supposed to be. That must be